Digitalization-greening coupling coordination on ESG performance in energy enterprises: Mechanisms, heterogeneity and...

Against the backdrop of global climate change and China's "Dual Carbon" strategy, the energy sector faces unprecedented pressure to simultaneously pursue digital and green transformation. However, existing literature predominantly examines the impacts of these two transformations on corporate ESG performance in isolation, neglecting their synergistic effects and the underlying transmission mechanisms. This study aims to examine the impact of the coupling coordination between digitalization and greening on the ESG performance of energy enterprises, and to investigate the mediating roles of absorptive capacity, human capital, and investor attention. Using panel data from 1543 firm-year observations of Chinese A-share listed energy companies from 2011 to 2022, we employ a fixed-effects model, mediation analysis framework, and dynamic panel system GMM method. The results indicate that the coupling coordination between digitalization and greening significantly enhances corporate ESG performance, with a one-standard-deviation increase in coordination degree leading to a 0.153 standard deviation improvement in ESG scores. Furthermore, we find that absorptive capacity, human capital upgrading, and investor attention serve as significant parallel mediating mechanisms, accounting for 27.3%, 38.5%, and 16.7% of the total effect respectively. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the promoting effect is more pronounced in enterprises located in western China and traditional energy firms. Additionally, we demonstrate that improved ESG performance further facilitates total factor productivity, explaining approximately 30.8% of the total effect of coupling coordination on economic efficiency. This study constructs a comprehensive "technology-organization-market" analytical framework, provides theoretical insights and empirical evidence for energy enterprises to achieve synergistic development of digitalization and greening, and offers policy implications for supporting the low-carbon and intelligent transformation of the energy industry.